By Allyn Vannoy
As the Allied armies advanced across Western Europe in the summer of 1944, the First Canadian Army undertook the task of clearing the coastal areas and opening the Channel ports. Fighting on the left flank of the Allied forces, the Canadians pushed rapidly eastward through France toward Belgium. The II Canadian Corps reached Ostend, Bruges, and Ghent in the middle of September.
After Allied forces landed in France on D-Day, June 6, the British Second Army pushed forward into the Low Countries and captured Brussels and Antwerp, the latter with its excellent port facilities intact. But the British advance halted with the Germans still controlling the Scheldt Estuary, a waterway running 50 miles from the North Sea to Antwerp. By September, it had become urgent for the Allies to open Antwerp to shipping in order to ease logistical burdens on their supply lines, which now stretched hundreds of miles back into Normandy.
American General Omar Bradley urged Allied commander in chief General Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure the British. “All plans for future operations always lead back to the fact that in order to supply an operation of any size beyond the Rhine, the port of Antwerp is essential.” Eisenhower agreed, telling British commander General Bernard Montgomery: “I insist upon the importance of Antwerp. As I have told you I am prepared to give you everything for the capture of the approaches to Antwerp, including all the air forces and anything else you can support.”
The British XXX Corps, after taking Antwerp, could have easily driven the additional 20 miles north and cut off German positions along the inlet to the port. The estuary itself was lined with German forces, including heavy coastal batteries on Walcheren Island that prevented Allied ships from approaching the Scheldt. During the first three weeks of September, however, the German Fifteenth Army withdrew, pulling off something of a minor miracle by extricating nearly 86,000 troops from possible encirclement south of the estuary, using boats and rafts to evacuate them northward across the Scheldt.
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I would not in any way diminish the effort at Antwerp but in terms of total casualties, including civilian, I would have to say that the battle for Manila in Feb-Mar 1945 that resulted in over 200,000 dead was probably the toughest urban battle after the Battle of Stalingrad. The nature of Japanese resistance at Manila and the Soviet mass attacks at Stalingrad, both of which trapped hundreds of thousands of civilians, were illustrative of urban warfare.